The skin is the largest organ in the human body. It protects the body from disease and physical damage and helps to regulate body temperature. Skin is made up of three layers, the epidermis, dermis, and fat layer also called the hypodermis.
The epidermis is the outer layer of skin that keeps vital fluids and harmful bacteria out of the body.
The dermis is the inner layer of skin that contains blood vessels, nerves, hair follicles, oil, and sweat glands. Severe damage to large areas of skin exposes the human organism to dehydration and infections that can result in death.
Basic ways of dealing with large losses of skin have been to use skin grafts from the patient (autografts) or from an unrelated donor or a cadaver. The former approach has the disadvantage that there may not be enough skin available, while the latter suffers from the possibility of rejection or infection.
Until the late twentieth century, skin grafts were constructed from the patient's own skin. This became a problem when the skin had been damaged extensively, making it impossible to treat severely injured patients with autografts only.
Recent advancements in artificial and 3D-printed skin could soon deliver those sensations and more to robots, prosthetics, and humans.
What Is Artificial Skin?
Artificial skin is a collagen scaffold that induces regeneration of the skin in mammals such as humans. Artificial skin uses sensors to help prosthetics and robotic limbs process sensations and perform tasks with dexterity. But the best artificial skins can only measure one stimulus.
Also, Alternatively, the term “artificial skin” sometimes is used to refer to skin-like tissue grown in a laboratory, although this technology is still quite a way away from being viable for use in the medical field. 'Artificial skin' can also refer to flexible semiconductor materials that can sense touch for those with prosthetic limbs.
An artificial skin graft offers several advantages over those derived from the patient and cadavers. It eliminates the need for tissue. Artificial Skin Typing. Artificial skin can be made in large quantities and frozen for storage and shipping, making it available as needed.
How Do Artificial Skin Come Into Existence?
In the mid-1980s, medical researchers and chemical engineers, working in fields of cell biology and plastics manufacturing, joined forces to develop tissue engineering to reduce the incidences of infection and rejection. One of the catalysts for tissue engineering was the growing shortage of organs available for transplantation.
In 1984, a Harvard Medical School surgeon, Joseph Vacanti, shared his frustration over the lack of available livers with his colleague Robert Langer, a chemical engineer at MIT. Together, they pondered whether new organs could be grown in the laboratory. The first step was to duplicate the body's production of tissue.
Langer came up with the idea of constructing a biodegradable scaffolding on which skin cells could be grown using fibroblasts, cells extracted from donated neonatal foreskins removed during circumcision.
In a variation of this technique developed by other researchers, the extracted fibroblasts are added to collagen, a fibrous protein found in connective tissue. When the compound is heated, the collagen gels and traps the fibroblasts, which in turn arrange themselves around the collagen, becoming compact, dense, and fibrous.
After several weeks, keratinocytes, also extracted from the donated foreskins, are seeded onto the new dermal tissue, where they create an epidermal layer.
How Skin Is Created?
Researchers want to create artificial skin that responds to multiple stimuli the way real skin does, creating more functionality. This requires embedded arrays of nanoscale sensors.
Depending on the number of sensors and array density, artificial skin can be hundreds of times more sensitive than human skin.
Researchers Created a nanoscale sensor that simultaneously detects temperature, humidity, and pressure. These sensors will be made of a smart polymer core which expands depending on the humidity and temperature, and a piezoelectric shell, which produces an electric current when pressure is applied.
These smart cores would be sandwiched between two nanoscale grids of electrodes, which sense the electrical charges given off when the sensors “feel” and then transmit this data. The idea is that it could be used like robotic hands to sense temperature or even things at a much smaller scale than humans can feel—for example, bacteria.
Materials Involved in Skin
The raw materials needed for the production of artificial skin fall into two categories, biological components, and the necessary laboratory equipment.
Most of the donated skin tissue comes from neonatal foreskins removed during circumcision. One foreskin can yield enough cells to make four acres of grafting material. Fibroblasts are separated from the dermal layer of the donated tissue.
The fibroblasts are quarantined while they are tested for viruses and other infectious pathogens such as IIV, hepatitis B and C, and mycoplasma.
Vials are kept frozen until the fibroblasts are needed to grow cultures. In the collagen method, keratinocytes are also extracted from the foreskin, tested, and frozen.
Laboratory equipment includes glass vials, tubing, roller bottles, grafting cartridges, molds, and freezers.
Manufacturing Process
The manufacturing process is comparatively easy and is classified into certain methods.
1. Mesh scaffolding method
- Fibroblasts are thawed and expanded
- Cells are transferred to a culture system
- Growth cycle completed
2. Collagen method
- Cells are transferred to a culture system
- Keratinocytes added
- Growth cycle completed
It would be fantastic if it could apply to humans but there's still lots of work that needs to be done by scientists in turning electronic pulses into signals that could be sent to the brain and recognized.
Written By - Bhagyadeep Jena
Edited By - Gunika Manchanda
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